Premier Rachel Notley didn’t just extend an olive branch to oil and gas leaders and investors on Tuesday. She brought the whole tree and shook it, raining down petals of praise and friendship.

The scene was the Stampede Investment Forum at McDougall Centre, with 24 international investors from 14 countries, 120 people from the industry, and eight members of Notley’s 11 member cabinet, including the premier.

Media weren’t allowed in, but Notley’s office made her speech available, and reports from the inside suggest widespread delight at her declaration that the oilsands “are a tremendous asset which have transformed Alberta into one of the world’s leading oil producers.”

A string of comments like that from the premier led Steve Allan, chairman of Calgary Economic Development, to call Notley’s speech “one of the better ones I’ve heard in a long time from an Alberta leader. It was first-class, couldn’t have been better.”

Notley delivered a flat-out endorsement of continued investment and expansion of the oilsands. It won’t please the left side of her party by de-emphasizing (but not ignoring) climate change and the environment.

This speech was a big change in tone from her recent campaign rhetoric, which focused on the royalty review and promised to “deliver better value to Albertans for the shared resources we all own together.”

On April 10, in full campaign mode, Notley said: “The Progressive Conservatives have squandered our wealth with a fire sale of our resources. We will stop the fire sale and start rewarding businesses that create upgrading and refining jobs at home.”

Notley was talking to voters then. On Tuesday, she spoke to big money. She wants it for the Alberta industry as much as any PC premier ever did. So she issued what amounted to a lifetime guarantee that investment will be safe under an NDP government.

“Expanding existing oilsands projects, establishing new ones and pioneering advanced technologies — all this requires spending on a large scale,” she said.

“We will maintain a warm welcome for investors and uphold their right to earn fair returns … Alberta will continue to be a healthy place for private investment under our government.”

She said that, for more than half a century, “Albertans have been coming up with unconventional solutions for an unconventional resource, so we can extract, handle and ship it responsibly, to the very best of our abilities.

“I’m here today to emphasize that the province has a government determined to defend this advantage by being constructive at home, and by building relationships around the world.”

Turning to fears about the NDP, she said: “I understand that people are uncertain after the last election.

“Whether you’re an Albertan or a longtime Alberta watcher, change at the top after so long can seem difficult.

“But we are working hard to make the transition as smooth as possible, and bring as much economic stability as we can, while we implement our plans.”

Those plans for good jobs, diversification and more upgrading can only happen “by supporting a free, open, sustainable and increasingly diversified economy,” Notley said.

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If oil were still at $100 US per barrel, instead of barely $50, Notley might never have given this speech.

But now, her strategists are eager to make sure that oil prices, not the NDP, takes the blame for job losses and the continuing slide.

“They want to win the next election,” says Allan, whose Calgary Economic Development was a key organizer of the event. “They know that if they’re going to be successful over the next four years, they have to win over Calgary.”

Her speech helped, he said, “because it’s a message we need to hear. It said we are open for business, we have to get this right, and recognized that we live in a competitive world.

“Hopefully this will settle people down and we’ll just get on with it.”

It certainly won’t settle anti-oilsands campaigners and other advocates who had some hopes for the NDP.

But in times like this, politics is all about jobs and the economy. A premier simply cannot be seen to scare money away.

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